Can We Survive the Panopticon??

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In March 1971, a group of semi-seasoned, amateur antiwar dissidents organized, executed, and were never prosecuted for the break-in and huge file removal of a Media, Pennsylvania FBI office. Betsy Medsger’s The Burglary gives the momentous, consequential completely illegal conspiracy a door-stopper journalistic exegesis, and would-be progressives and latter-day liberals would do well to read the inside scoop – and realize that in this era of Wikileaks disappearance and the global Panpticon, nothing like it will ever happen again.

This was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI – an odious, cultish fascist analogue to the Stasi, though Medsger demurs at the comparison. And guess who survived the revelations of malevolent, omnipresent criminal activity that these impeccably purloined files revealed? Two groups of three letters come to mind – The FBI and The CIA. And since 1971, guess which ruling system of power has only exponentially expanded its illegal policing powers? Why, the US-led supersystem, that what. Social institutions which reveal themselves as thoroughly corrupt, imbricated with embedded incentives to destroy humane regulation to further their fascist charters, do not change their nature – they simply mutate into new, often more concealed versions of their revealed antisocial selves. Witness the Catholic Church, the Mafia, the aforementioned twin criminal conspiracies of the FBI and the CIA, the courts, the medical establishment, the US election and electoral systems, the US military, and corporate rock.

None of these unmasked institutions has been or will be regulated or engage in any substantive internal reform, because to do so would be to throw off each of these massive pillars’ legacies of inherent corruption. Any would-be progressive trying to tangle with these entrenched organizations, like grandpa Bernie or his long line of quixotic forebears, will be absorbed, discarded and shrugged off by these behemoths.

We can only look for ironies, like the few that emerge from within the bowels of epic hatred in these organization – Mark Felt, the Deep Throat do-gooder of Watergate fame, was a Hoover acolytte (you know what that likely meant) offered a plan to kidnap the daughter of the sister of Bernadine Dohrn.

They, the capitalizers in the supersystem and their Big Data machines, are watching and collating and checking all of us, and with the now-decades-long emergence of the Internets, they are drowning in knowledge of who were are, what we do, what plastic lawn furniture we salver over.

None of us are breaking into any governmental office ever again.

Do you think the Wikileaks and Anonymous hackers are having a good Wargames post-hack career, or are they down for the count?

All we got are these lousy blogs and our yet-to-be remotely-controlled interior psyches.